Sleepless Nights

Author: Veronica

  • I am such a country girl

    It doesn’t take much to send me into paroxysms of delight nowadays. A rabbit, some fruit trees and some blue metal will just about do it.

    The mud has been steadily rising here, threatening to swallow my house whole. Fifteen ducks paddling in it have been making it worse and when an equal number of chooks stand around the front door yelling for food, while also scratching through the mud for interesting grubs, it can only end in disaster.

    I put my foot down when I started to feel like it might just be easier to mud ski around parts of my paddock and insisted that we order some blue metal (crushed rock) to cover the muddy areas with.

    It’s interesting to see who you know in our relatively small community and the woman on the other end of the phone when we ordered, was a girl that I had gone to school with. She arranged for everything to be dropped off that very same afternoon, while I imagined a future in which sliding through the mud wouldn’t exist. Blissful thoughts.

    Of course, like all things possibly related to Murphy, the truck arrived while I was in the middle of collecting eggs that hadn’t been collected while I was away. There I was standing in my daggiest clothes, with blackberry leaves caught in my hair, and my shirt pulled up to make a basket for the eight eggs I had just collected, three of them covered heavily in chook poo.

    Never let me tell you that my life is glamorous.

    Chook poo and a hoisted up shirt aside, Isaac and Amy were also outside with me.

    There is only so much consoling you can do when your shirt is full of eggs and shit and your toddler is trying to flail on the ground in duck poo and mud, while a truck roars and beeps in the background.

    On the upside, no one got squashed, we didn’t smash any eggs and duck poo washes off small boys quite easily. Thank god.

    Nathan spent the day shifting blue metal yesterday and I must say, I am not missing the mud slide. Not at all.

    ***

    Today of course, I was hunter gathering, as I’m wont to do. This is no ordinary hunter gathering mind you, this is bare hands and unsuitable shoes type hunter gathering.

    First, I picked out some new fruit trees, while holding fourteen kilos of toddler on my hip and smiling at the woman who was helping me. THEN, I insisted that Isaac hug his grandmother while I sorted out my gift certificate and Nathan bought new mattresses in the next door shop.

    And then I came home and caught a rabbit, with my bare hand. Only one hand, the other hand was full of an egg that my chooks had laid.

    Yes, you read that right, I caught a rabbit. WITH MY HAND.

    Behold! My awe inspiring rabbit catching abilities.

    Okay, so it was only a baby and it had run into an old cupboard and possibly all I did was flip the cupboard over onto its back so that the rabbit couldn’t jump out, but I CAUGHT IT.

    There is something to be said for being able to announce to the collective members of a room (front yard) “Hey, so I just caught a rabbit. BY MYSELF. Want to see?” and then actually produce a live rabbit for the gooing and the gaahing over.

    Hunter gathering went well today.

    Now if I can just find where my bloody poultry are hiding their nests, I’ll be lots happier.

    ***

    The bunny was so small that I couldn’t be bothered killing it. I don’t mind shooting, but there is just something so personal about breaking a neck, or chopping off a head, you know? Plus, with all the effort I went to to catch the little thing, it hardly seemed fair that then I would then be the one gutting and skinning it and getting all up and personal with its sneeze making fur.

    And I might have had a Watership Downs flashback and wondered who was waiting for the baby rabbit at home and not been able to stop myself personifying it.

    [Digression: The cat was waiting for the baby rabbit when I went back to let it go. He had been patiently sitting on the piece of tin I had blocked the opening with, waiting for his dinner to make its way out of the box. Now I know both why the cat is so fat and why there was a baby rabbit in the middle of my paddock in the first place. Curiosity satisfied.]

  • In the paper

    I was lucky enough to end up in the newspaper again today. Apparently someone thinks I’m doing well enough to answer questions for “The Other Side” in the Saturday Magazine from The Mercury.



    Click the picture to read the article.

    Thanks to Tim Martain for asking me.

  • Working with brands while keeping your reputation intact

    Working with brands is a hot button topic at the moment. In this golden era of Australian Mummyblogging, everyone is being pitched by brands, asked to attend brand events and promote stuff to their followers.

    I was lucky enough to be invited to Sydney this week to attend a brand event hosted by Colgate. You probably saw my guilty tweets yesterday about how I need to brush my teeth more often and my frustration that despite Amy being obsessive about toothbrushing, her teeth continue to fall apart thanks to Ehlers Danlos. Yay us.

    The event wasn’t all about teeth however, the main message was about trust. With Colgate being named Australia’s Most Trusted Brand, they wanted to discuss trust with bloggers and how to increase our trust, by working with trusted brands. Which is an interesting concept, if you think about it. Previously working with brands was thought to decrease trust, but now I’m not so certain.

    As bloggers, our reputation is the most important thing we have. Our blogs live and die by our reputation and someone whose audience loses trust in them is not going to have an audience for very much longer.

    Brand events are all the rage and this is fantastic, for bloggers and for brands. But are we really thinking about which brands we align our names and reputations alongside?

    This is important to think about. If a brand reaches out to bloggers and works with 10 bloggers and then ends up in the media for bad practise, then this reflects on the blogger. We might not like this fact, especially if we didn’t know that the brand was about to land in hot water (think BP oil spill, Nestle third world practise).

    Whether we like it or not, brands that we work with DO reflect on our reputation.

    To be fair, brands that we review for reflect less on our reputations – especially if the review given was balanced and honest – than brands that we work with. Working with means writing about, promoting to our followers as a good brand to be part of and accepting sponsorship.

    Working with brands, while only one small part of blogging, continues to be something that many of us want to do. I think I have a responsibility to think about the reputation of a brand before working with them, in order to not harm my own reputation.

    We ended our event yesterday with a round table discussion on trust, relationships with brands, Klout, PR and how to grow traffic. It was honestly a fantastic session, and I am pleased to have been able to be involved.

    So now my question is: How do you feel about blogger trust and reputation? Does someone promoting a crappy brand to their followers automatically make you think less of them?

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  • Jetsetting

    I realised today in the middle of my procrastination, that I am actually flying to Sydney tomorrow and not at some vague point in the future. This is when I started to think of all the things I needed to do before I leave, that I hadn’t done yet.

    Of course, all of this combined with trying to pack a suitcase (where on earth are my black pants? Someone? Anyone? You there, go look in my washing pile) and console a miserable toddler left me wanting to sit in a corner rocking.

    It’s all going to be fine though, I fly on the plane, I get off the plane, I get into a cab and make it to my hotel unscathed. Then I kill two hours with a friend, while I wait for Kellie and Louisa to arrive at the hotel and then we’ll be fine.

    It’s only a flying visit, a bit over 24 hours and then home again and back to reality.

    Of course, I’m not sure I’m going to want to come back to reality once I’ve stayed in one of these apartments. Honestly, the 1 bedroom apartment is bigger than half of my HOUSE. Colour me gobsmacked.

    I’m not entirely sure what I’ve done to warrant all of these invitations to things, but whatever it is, I’m not complaining.

    ***

    In other news, I mentioned on twitter and Facebook – I managed to secure full sponsorship to Blogopolis, care of Kellogg’s. I’m really looking forward to working with them and just wanted to thank them quickly here for sponsoring me, while giving you guys the heads up that I now have an agreement with Kellogg’s.

  • I’ve got a new toy

    And no, it’s not that kind of toy.

    Last time I travelled interstate, I did so without an iPhone and without anything to keep me connected to the Internet. I pinched Mum’s iPhone for the occasional tweet, but really I was completely unplugged. Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t actually good for me.

    The time before that, it was the Aus Blog Con and while I had a working iPhone, I got rather twitchy that I couldn’t check emails while I was gone and I did miss meeting some people because I didn’t get their emails until 48 hours after the event.

    If we add a few interstate trips coming up, plus my utter addiction to all things technology, you can probably see that I was angling for a new portable computer thingy.

    Being tax time, which is the only time Nathan and I have any money, I ran the finances through my incredibly complicated budget system (pen and paper) and decided that if we were careful, I could afford to buy myself some sort of tablet device thing, to use for emails/twitter/writing when I’m not at home.

    So yesterday, I bought myself an Acer Iconia android tablet and I am in love. Unfortunately so are my children and so I’m spending today twitching every so slightly while I wait for them to get distracted so that I can stroke it.

    We also spent some money on the house, buying plaster gap filler and yellow paint for Amy’s bedroom and our budget has money set aside for more paint, lining for my kitchen, fruit trees (care of a Christmas gift voucher), new mattresses for the bunk beds that my children are moving into and new clothes for the kids. Once that is done, everything is back to normal until next tax time.

    On the upside, I do have a lot of beans and rice. That’s always a bonus when you don’t have to budget buying poverty food into the mix.

    It feels good to buy something solely for myself.

    Now I just need to find money in the budget to replace my falling apart shoes and we’ll all be good.